On the William Wellman Depression Express

AS a filmmaker William Wellman loved planes, trains and automobiles  but mostly planes. A volunteer member of the Lafayette Flying Corps in World War I, he drew on his experiences as a combat pilot for “Wings” (1927), his first major hit as a director and the first film to win the Academy Award for best picture (then called most outstanding production).

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And Wellman continued to draw on his aviation background throughout his long career in Hollywood (including his 1954 hit, “The High and the Mighty”), not only to tap the thrill of fast, free movement but also to create emotionally vivid, male-centered melodramas. His most personal films portray the bonds that develop between men under pressure and what happens when those bonds are threatened by a female presence.

Warner Home Video has devoted this third and latest volume in its “Forbidden Hollywood” series of pre-Code films to six features from Wellman’s most intensely creative period, the years he spent as a contract director at Warner Brothers in the early 1930s: between “Maybe It’s Love” (1930) and “Female” (1933), he directed 17 movies in whole or in part, including a couple of loan-outs to RKO and MGM. Most of these 70- to 80-minute features are swift, hard, topical dramas, filmed in the vigorous, headlong style epitomized by his best-known picture of the time, “The Public Enemy” (1931).

“The Public Enemy,” which made a star of James Cagney, isn’t part of the current collection. (It has already been issued, in a recently rediscovered, uncensored print, as part of the “Warner Gangsters Collection, Volume 1.”) But Wellman’s first film with Cagney is here: the superb “Other Men’s Women” (1931), a railroad drama in which Cagney, billed sixth, makes a remarkable entrance bounding along atop a line of moving boxcars (clearly Wellman’s kind of guy).

The plot of “Other Men’s Women” lays out the archetypical Wellman situation. Bill (Grant Withers) and Jack (Regis Toomey) work together as fireman and engineer, driving freight trains through Southern California; all is well until Bill, a hard-drinking, unsettled type, finds himself falling for Jack’s warmly domestic wife, Lily (Mary Astor). Tensions explode into a fistfight in the engine cab, causing an accident in which Jack is left blinded and Bill burdened with unbearable guilt. Redemption, a recurring motif in Wellman films, is available only through sacrifice in the line of duty, and Bill finds his chance during a spectacular finale, when rising flood waters threaten to wipe out a trestle bridge.

Recently freed from the constraints of studio-bound early-sound technology, Wellman seems almost giddy with the possibilities of location shooting, moving his camera with abandon, staging dialogue scenes atop moving trains, constructing at least one live sound set (a greasy spoon where the waitress is a young Joan Blondell) in the middle of a busy switchyard, where freight trains rumble past. The gigantic engines become the objective correlatives of the characters’ clashing emotions, as the powerful imagery overcomes Wellman’s enduring flaw: a simplistic, often inconsistent sense of character.

That flaw is very much on display in “The Purchase Price” (1932). Barbara Stanwyck stars as a New York showgirl who hides out from a possessive gangster boyfriend (Lyle Talbot) by agreeing to become the mail-order bride of a Midwestern farmer (George Brent). Wellman presents the rural characters, including the miscast Brent, as lumbering cretins, never quite accounting for the sudden change of heart that propels Stanwyck into Brent’s arms and a new identity as a gallant homesteader in a gingham dress.

Women remain abstract figures in “Frisco Jenny” (1932), with Ruth Chatterton as the mannish proprietor of a San Francisco brothel; and “Midnight Mary” (1933), with Loretta Young as (another) Broadway babe prepared to take a murder rap to protect her married lover (a dweeby Franchot Tone).

Made at MGM, “Midnight Mary” smoothes out the rough edges of Wellman’s style: the shots match and the tone is more even, but the vigor and spontaneity of the Warner films is almost gone. Those qualities return in spades in the final two titles in the collection, both superlative examples of Warner Brothers social drama at its grittiest and most engaged. In “Heroes for Sale” (1933), Richard Barthelmess plays Tom Holmes, a Job-like figure who endures most of the horrors that the early 20th century had to offer.

Wounded in trench fighting in the Great War, Tom comes home with a morphine addiction that costs him his job in a bank, the first of many misfortunes that include losing his wife (Loretta Young, whose saintly good looks find better use here) in a violent strike action, serving a jail term as a dangerous radical and finally being forced out on the road with the army of the unemployed, chased from town to town by local cops and railroad dicks. “Anyhow, we’ve got something to be thankful for,” Tom observes near the end of the film. “It’s stopped raining!”

“Wild Boys of the Road” (1933) also takes place in a Depression America of foreclosures, flophouses and freight yards, although this time the characters are a pair of middle-class teenagers (Frankie Darro and Edwin Phillips) who have left home to relieve the burden on their parents. The emotional triangle returns, this time provoked by a buddy who turns out to be a girl in disguise (Dorothy Coonan, Wellman’s future wife and mother of their seven children). (Louise Brooks played a similarly ambiguous figure in his 1928 Paramount silent, “Beggars of Life.”)

As in “Other Men’s Women,” a railroad accident has tragic results for a central character, though the film is not as bleak as “Heroes for Sale.” This time Wellman allows for a distant glimmer of hope, in the form of a judge (Robert Barrat) who is carefully framed alongside a National Recovery Administration poster.

Wellman was not an elegant stylist, like his Warner Brothers colleagues Michael Curtiz and William Dieterle, but his movies, particularly from this period, have a blunt, almost physical force that carries its own conviction. In “The Purchase Price” Wellman has a character punch the camera right in the “face,” a shot that Sam Fuller would rediscover 20 years later.

The enforcement of the Production Code in 1934 would put severe restraints on Wellman’s rambunctiousness, though he would continue to produce films of value until the end of his career (which came, appropriately, with the semi-autobiographical “Lafayette Escadrille” in 1958, with Tab Hunter as an American ace pilot flying for France in World War I).

This collection, assembled with the taste and technical excellence we’ve come to expect from Warner DVDs, offers an outstanding introduction to a very rich body of work. (Warner Home Video, $49.98, not rated)

ALSO OUT THIS WEEK

QUANTUM OF SOLACE James Bond (Daniel Craig) takes on a villain (Mathieu Amalric) with designs on the world’s water supply in this latest installment, directed by Marc Forster, in the long-running franchise. “Bond’s thirst for vengeance seems to have dampened his libido, as well as his wit,” A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times in November. (MGM, Blu-ray $39.99, two-disc special edition $34.98, single-disc $29.99, PG-13)

GOLDFINGER First-generation Bond, with Sean Connery as Agent 007 and Gert Fröbe as one of his most memorable opponents, now available on Blu-ray. “It is good fun, all right, fast and furious,” Bosley Crowther wrote in The Times in 1964. Also being released this week on Blu-ray “Moonraker” (1979), “Never Say Never Again” (1983) and “The World Is Not Enough” (1999). (MGM, $34.99 each, PG)

THE LAST METROFrançois Truffaut’s 1980 drama stars Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu as members of a Parisian theatrical company during the German occupation. In The Times in 1980 Vincent Canby called it “a dazzlingly subversive work.” (Criterion Collection, available in Blu-ray and standard definition, $39.95, not rated)

TO CATCH A THIEF A retired cat burglar (Cary Grant) dallies with a spoiled heiress (Grace Kelly) on the Cote d’Azur in a new transfer of the Alfred Hitchcock classic. The movie “does nothing but give out a good, exciting time,” Crowther said in The Times in 1955. (Paramount, $24.99, not rated)

CAREFUL A newly remastered edition of Guy Maddin’s compelling oddity of 1992, a mountain melodrama fraught with frustrated sexuality and filmed in the style of an early talkie. “The movie’s biggest strength is its knowing burlesques of antiquated cinematic techniques,” Stephen Holden said in The Times in 1992. (Zeitgeist, $29.99, not rated)

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Movies »A version of this article appeared in print on March 22, 2009, on page AR12 of the New York edition.